Sahmat Collective genius from India at Smart Museum

March 27, 2013

A rickshaw installation from the Sahmat Collective art show at the Smart Museum of Art.

A faded umbrella hangs from the ceiling of the Smart Museum of Art, where an exhibition devoted to the Sahmat Collective has taken over the main galleries. "Let Us Defend Our Secular Tradition," spell the English letters on one panel; "We Are All Ayodhya," announces the Hindi on another. A nearby photograph shows a similar parasol, held aloft of a crowd of people at a 1993 arts performance in Ayodhya, the holy Indian city where a few months earlier a mob of Hindu activists had destroyed a 16th-century mosque in retribution for the demolition of a Hindu temple on the same site, some 500 years prior.

Modest gestures like this umbrella fill the museum as part of "The Sahmat Collective: Art and Activism in India Since 1989," an exhaustive exhibition devoted to what is arguably the largest-ever voluntary collaborative of artists for a common political purpose. Other such gestures include whimsical children's books, 1-foot-square paintings expressing messages against ethnic and religious nationalism, postcards inspired by the teachings of Gandhi, messages of brotherly love painted on auto rickshaws, and 5-inch-cube sculptures presented as gift boxes to India on the 50th anniversary of its independence.

It's an exhibition full of hundreds of small works of art and references to thousands more, most of which may not be especially moving in and of themselves, at least not to a North American viewer whose understanding of the complex political situation in India comes primarily via the helpful-if-copious wall labels and didactic videos. That said, the exhibition is much more importantly and affectingly about the genius of collective action, about the extraordinarily broad and diverse impact that countless individual drawings and songs and poems and plays can have when brought together for a truly pluralistic and public purpose.

Sahmat was founded in 1989 in the aftermath of the death of Safdar Hashmi, a 34-year-old political activist and playwright who was attacked while he and his troupe were putting on a street play in support of a workers strike on the outskirts of Delhi. Weeks later a group of artists, writers, actors, scholars, filmmakers and cultural activists established the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust and Committee. (Its acronym soon became its common name, since "sahmat" is Hindi for "in agreement.") Sahmat continues to exist today, with no rules of membership and a list of participants a few thousand long that includes many of India's best-known artists and intellectuals.

Hashmi's murder in 1989 was just the beginning. Over the course of its two decades but especially during its first, Sahmat witnessed and responded to dramatic increases of ethnic and religious violence across India. The group's genius has been its ability to deal with these challenges on a national scale — no small feat considering the country is the second most populous on Earth, with one-sixth of the world's people.

And yet, grand budgets and new technologies have played almost no role whatsoever in Sahmat's endeavors, nor have individual works of artistic brilliance. Instead, the extraordinary accomplishments of Sahmat have been achieved mostly through humble means and genuine collectivity. Thus an exhibition organized in response to the mosque destruction in Ayodhya could open simultaneously in 17 cities across the country because it was produced in an offset edition of 400 copies, to be mounted according to the means of local presenters.

When Hindu nationalists attacked the exhibition and had it seized by police, Sahmat spent eight years in court fighting a landmark case against censorship. The exhibition notes these and dozens of other actions that happened in the courts, in parliament or in the media, far outside the typical realm of art making and showing.

"Slogans for Communal Harmony," organized in 1992 as part of Sahmat's larger campaign against religious fundamentalism and sectarianism — known in South Asia as communalism — invited auto rickshaw drivers to decorate their taxis with messages about unity. Hundreds paraded across Delhi in one of India's largest public art projects, and the mantras apparently remained visible for years afterward. Their sincere content gives pause in our own city, where a taxi ride is often akin to participating in the ad campaign plastered across the car's roof and blaring from its interior television monitor.

The previous year Sahmat exhibited "Images and Words" as part of the same campaign. Its slight parts give little sense of its ambitious whole: The artworks were small, square panels on the anti-communalism theme by some 400 artists, poets, writers and other cultural workers. Mounted on sturdy cloth banners and hung from bamboo poles, they could be carried in processions or mounted on simple frames. Lightweight and portable, the show eventually traveled to 30 cities across India. It may have been the most viewed and visited exhibition in the history of independent India.